Question 1

Does this SSD come with screws? Some reviews said they didn't but newer ones said it did.

Accepted Answer

yes mine came with screws  really tiny but standards hold up they will work, Mine went on a n MSI motherboard that had a mounting post with screw top. thi is NOT a duct tape mount item

Question 2

Will a SATA III drive work in a computer previously configured with a SATA II drive?

Accepted Answer

SATA III vs SATA II should not be a problem (although, if your laptop only handles SATA II, you will only get SATA II speeds out of the drive).

However, be aware that this is an mSATA drive -- it's tiny by comparison to the normal 2.5 inch laptop drive, and plugs into your laptop differently than a normal laptop SSD or hard drive.

Question 3

Do they come with Screws?
Are they RAID 1 compatible?

Accepted Answer

Yes, it comes with screws (although they weren't the right ones for my particular computer). I don't know about the RAID 1 support, but I suppose if you had two mSATA slots, you could mirror them, since the computer treats it as a regular drive.

Question 4

I have an HP Pavilion dv6-3225dx. The hard drive is a Hitachi HDD 5K500 B-500 P/N H2T5000854S which is 5V 500mA SATA. I want to replace it with a SSD. Is this drive compatible?

Thanks.

Accepted Answer

Having mSATA is still a bit rare for most new laptops, and yours seems like it may not be as new. Most of the laptops with mSATA also have regular SATA, so these kind of drives are great where laptops are taking advantage of a little extra chassis space or intel's solutions for hybridized SSD/HDD.

I agree with other answers here: sounds like you want to replace your drive completely, and for that you want a regular SATA SSD, not an mSATA. For example, try model # MZ-7TE250BW. That is a well-proven drive.

Question 5

Is there support for migrating OS/Software with the product?  Does the migration s/w (if any) work with multi-boot (Windows & Ubuntu) systems?

Accepted Answer

You can migrate Ubuntu by formatting the drive, mounting root and boot filesystems, and performing cp -a of your original directories and editing the UUIDs of filesystems in the new /etc/fstab to match the newly formatted partitions on SSD. Make sure that you use ext4 or other filesystem with TRIM support when formatting root filesystem on SSD, but ext2 for boot filesystem. Add "discard,noatime,nodiratime" options for the root filesystem in the above mentioned fstab file.

If you are removing the original drive, you will have to install GRUB on thr MBR of the new one (use grub-install). On boot filesystem, either manually edit UUIDs in /grub/grub.cfg . Use blkid utility to determine UUIDs of all filesystems, and mount utility to check which filesystem is the original root. There must be two distinct UUIDs mentioned in grub.cfg, one for boot, one for root, unless the original configuration uses a single filesystem for both.

Once everything is replaced and new system is booted, update-grub will re-generate grub.cfg to match all filesystems.

I have no idea how to migrate Windows.

Question 6

I have a question when cloning to this SSD. I originally purchased a Dell Windows 7 computer and then subsequently upgraded to Win 8.1 pro. Under disk management, I see three separate partitions on my C:\ drive namely:  a) OEM Partition (39 MB), b) Recovery Partition (21.15 GB  NTFS), and c) OS C:\ partition ( NTFS). Since my computer has gone through several changes since I bought it in 2012 including the Win 8.1 upgrade, what is the need for cloning, if any, of the OEM Partition and Recovery Partition. Would it not be better to ONLY clone the “OS c:\ partition” (which presumably has the O/S, all my programs and files) and then create a new recovery partition after cloning? Also, will the SSD boot if I just clone the OS C:\ partition (or is there a hidden or separate boot partition?)

Accepted Answer

I'm unaware if the recovery partition is required by win 8.1 but that would be silly in my opinion.  I'm not even sure if I can boot to recovery once cloned but I don't care because I have a full bootable image backup done via todo backup every 2 hours over the network.

I didn't change the partition layout while cloning because I wanted to take the path of least resistance, and the space gained by removing the partitions was relatively negligible for me.

As far as how the computer is set up to boot, my guess is if you had the computer in 2012 then there's a good chance you are NOT on UEFI bios boot mode (which is supposed to simplify things a bit and add more security and large drive support but you need a bios that supports it). In that case the MBR (first sector) of the boot drive (search order configured in bios) runs the default Microsoft bootstrap code which points to the C:\ partition (at that point they are just physical drive offsets and logical partition offsets, and there are options to put up a menu to choose OS or recovery / oem install mode here).  There are tools to update this bootstrap configuration if you change the partition setup of your computer but they are mostly commandline and somewhat involved, which is why I wanted to avoid switching things around in the first place.

Although it's possible to have the bootstrap code running on a different boot drive or partition than where the default boot OS is stored, my guess is that it's unlikely as a factory setup.  But it would take some research on tools to verify.

I do recall that the laptop I installed this in put up quite a fuss when I tried to keep both the msata and the old hdd in there, but that was entirely a limitation of that laptop's particular bios and its unwillingness to look at the msata as the primary boot drive.  My solution: remove the old drive.  lol

Sorry for abstract responses, just trying to help you out in case you don't get any other responses.

Question 7

can anyone advise what is the power consumption of this msata in write, read, idle, sleep modes?  Is there any way to know?  the stated 1 mW idle and 0.2 watt (200 mW) inactive in the specs makes no sense!   The Samsung in my Lenovo states states 3 watts (3000mW) active and 0.087 watt (87mW) idle which makes much more sense - active higher than idle.  
 What does DEVSLP mean with the Plextor?   the feature statement claiming "Reduce the power consumption to 1mW, down from the current 50mW in the DEVSLP state" tells us what??

Accepted Answer

DEVSLP is deep sleep, more on the lines a way to draw less power. It will be supported in Haswell systems and beyond and is part of the 6Gb sata spec. Plextor was planning ahead on this device to support it.

as for power consumption I don't have a way to test so I can't tell you. I also use this in a non haswell system so I can't say how well the DEVSLP works.

Questions & Answers